‘The Iron Giant’
The Iron Giant is not one of the best animated films ever made—it’s one of the best films ever made, period. It was the directorial debut for The Incredibles‘s Brad Bird, and it starred the voice of Vin Diesel as the Iron Giant, a 50-foot tall metal man who crash-lands in the fictional small town of Rockwell, Maine during the Cold War, in 1957. I won’t recap the plot, as I assume you’ve seen it already—and if you haven’t, go fix that immediately—but I will say that no other film makes me cry like The Iron Giant. Recently, the film celebrated its 20th birthday, and it’s just as tender, hilarious, and gut-wrenching in 2019 as it was in 1999, and the lessons it taught us about gun violence feel more urgent now than ever before. If you have a child you’re hoping to raise into an empathetic adult, you’ll never go wrong with The Iron Giant.